It's a crime S.F. surveillance cameras are a flop

William Gantt sat in a wheelchair at 16th and Mission on Monday afternoon, almost right under one of the city's 76 crime surveillance cameras. Gantt, 56, said he was in favor of the cameras in his neighborhood, but was surprised to hear that no one was watching the feed.

"I always thought they were hooked up to a police station and they could see what was going on," Gantt said.

Nope. That would make too much sense.

No doubt about it, the current crime camera program has problems. The video is choppy, the cameras are immobile, they don't pick up images well at night, and the process to view a tape is too complicated. No wonder the cameras hardly ever seem to catch anyone doing anything wrong. "Why don't we just turn them off and sell them for scrap?" asked Police Commission President Theresa Sparks. "That would save some money."

But there is a common sense, relatively quick and inexpensive way to actually make the cameras useful.

"Is this a worthwhile conversation to have?" asked Nate Ballard, spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom. "Yes. The mayor wants to be very careful with protecting civil liberties, but he's not averse to having the discussion."

Opponents for years have complained that residents' civil liberties are violated by government oversight of cameras in crime-ridden neighborhoods. Before San Francisco's cameras went up in 2005, some compromises were brokered: The cameras would be checked only if a crime occurred nearby and they are turned off if political demonstrations are held in the area. That was before a study by UC Berkeley showed in March that the cameras had little effect on violent crime.

Some on the Board of Supervisors think - and you can hardly blame them - that the program has been such a flop that there is no need to keep sending good money after bad. Last week, the finance committee voted not to fund $200,000 this year to keep the cameras on.

The mayor found the money in a reserve fund to keep pursing this program that nearly everyone agrees hasn't been effective. As one observer said, the city has decided not to fish or cut bait.

And that's because there is one group that really likes the cameras: voters. Newsom wouldn't be pushing this idea if he didn't think it played well with his constituents.

Neighborhoods like the cameras, but their performance needs to be improved. This is a tight budget year, so the idea of scrapping all the cameras and replacing them with some that can zoom, tilt, and see in the dark is out of the question.

But a small change in the way the existing cameras are used might provide some benefits. Even the Police Commission's Sparks, who has bluntly criticized the system, thinks live monitoring might have some merit.

"You can't say you're for cameras if you're not going to let them work," she said. "I think we could look at a system that is constantly monitored. We could probably do that with an amount of money that is less than what we paid for new cameras."

She said the cameras could be monitored for between $200,000 and $500,000 next fiscal year, and that includes the cost of setting up a monitoring station.

The idea, Ryan said, would be to hire retired police officers who are familiar with police codes and procedures. Ideally, he said, the system would be linked with Shot Spotter, a new technology already being used in some neighborhoods to identify the location of gunshots immediately after a gun is fired. If a shot was fired, someone in the central command could quickly click to a camera in that area.

That, of course, raises privacy issues. Nicole Ozer of the ACLU of Northern California, said that although people think cameras will make them safer, they turn out to be "intrusive and do not prevent crime from occurring."

That begins the dueling statistics. The ACLU said Chicago, for example, actually saw an increase in its murder rate after cameras went up there; meanwhile, Chicago police reported that the cameras helped them make 1,200 arrests in less than a year and a half.

At some point the issue always comes down to how we don't want someone secretly watching us. That was a major concern - 15 years ago. Now we're on camera all day, every day.

"There are 144 cameras at City Hall," Ryan said. "Every bus has a camera, every bank, and every convenience store. That ship has sailed."

The cameras are already in place. Isn't it dumb not to watch what they show?